Digital Media Team Sees Dramatic Improvement in Efficiency and Productivity of Content Creation Workflow, Meeting Demand for Access to Game Content

Quantum Corp. announced that the University of Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish Media has deployed a workflow storage system powered by StorNext® to increase its speed and productivity in creating athletics-focused video features, live game webcasts, highlights, coaches’ shows and documentary-style filmed entertainment, as well as a growing volume of educational content. The efficient, collaborative Quantum storage platform enables the Fighting Irish Media team to produce event highlights within minutes of a sports event’s conclusion. The new workflow also has improved overall editing productivity by 50 percent.

Meeting Fighting Irish Fan DemandFighting Irish Media covers 26 teams ranging from football and basketball to swimming, fencing, tennis, golf and lacrosse. In addition to streaming 125-130 athletic events a year, posting over 1,000 short-form videos on a variety of platforms and creating TV shows and features, the Fighting Irish Media team supports content creation and distribution for the broader Notre Dame educational and faith mission.

For its athletics coverage, the team previously had sent cameras out to events, brought footage back, copied it to removable drives and then edited, transcoded and distributed finished clips. The process often took hours. Realizing that it was missing a valuable opportunity to connect with fans and address their desire for more timely content, the team undertook an upgrade that would help it to create and distribute content more quickly.

“Our audience wanted to see event highlights in as close to real time as possible, but we simply didn’t have the infrastructure to meet that goal,” said Scott Rinehart, broadcast technology program director at Fighting Irish Media. “The new StorNext-based collaborative workflow changed that, dramatically reducing the time it takes to post and deliver content. Projects that once took hours to complete are now finished and made available to fans in minutes. This means that people who attend a Notre Dame game can watch highlights as they walk back to their cars.”

Building an Efficient Collaborative Workflow With Quantum StorageThe new environment now supporting Fighting Irish Media’s production workflow includes the Quantum storage platform integrated with Telestream Pipeline, Adobe Creative Cloud 2015 and CatDV, an asset management system. Live feeds are brought into the shared storage environment via Telestream Pipeline, and, as this content is ingested, the Quantum system enables multiple editors to work simultaneously on the same media and create finished clips for distribution. SAN performance via single-mode fiber to the desktops ensures rapid access to content and speeds completion of projects.

The scalable nature of the StorNext-powered solution will make it easy for the Fighting Irish Media team to accommodate the increasing demand for sports and educational content, as well as the inevitable increase in content resolution and file sizes.